Mada Masr

Police forcefully dispersed a sit-in by over
1,200 workers from the Ministry of Religious Endowments in the early
hours of Monday morning outside Abdeen Presidential Palace.

The
workers were demanding full-time contracts to reflect the hours they
work, and the reinstatement of several thousand colleagues who were
sacked by ministerial officials in recent months, among other demands.

One
of the protesters, Sabry Shehata, told Mada Masr that riot police were
deployed around midnight. By 12.30 am they were using batons to beat
those who refused to evacuate the protest site.

The demonstration reportedly
began at around 9 am on Sunday outside the headquarters of the Ministry
of Religious Endowments in Downtown Cairo. After getting no response
from ministerial officials, protesters relocated to Abdeen Presidential
Palace, just a few blocks away from the ministry.

The plan was reportedly to carry out an open-ended sit-in until state officials met their demands.

Shehata
said it was clear that police wouldn’t tolerate the protest outside the
palace, even though they weren’t obstructing the street. “We had
congregated in a grassy area by the side of the road and weren’t
blocking traffic.”

Police officers told workers they didn’t have
authorization to protest, let alone to protest outside one of the
presidential palaces.

Several workers suffered from bruising after
being beaten by riot police. But security forces didn’t use teargas,
rubber bullets, or water cannons, and no arrests were reported, as has
been the case with other recent protests.

Shehata asserted that
their demands were professional and not political. “We have been
employed by the Endowments Ministry for years without full-time
contracts, despite the fact that we work full-time, six days a week.
Many of us have been working on a full-time basis for five or six years,
on temporary-work contracts.”

Shehata, who has
been employed as a custodial mosque worker for the Giza authority of the
Endowments Ministry for six years, said he earns LE600 per month — half
the minimum wage.

“I don’t have enough money to feed or clothe my
two children,” he stated, adding, “I can make sacrifices and cut my own
expenditures, but are my children supposed to go hungry too?”

Workers
employed by the Endowments Ministry in the governorates of Beheira,
Kafr al-Sheikh, Alexandria, Giza, and Gharbiya joined the sit-in with
similar demands.

Hundreds of workers who had been fired from their
jobs in Alexandria participated, demanding that they be reinstated. An
estimated 4,000 workers were reportedly fired by the ministry’s
authorities in this Mediterranean governorate.

Local media reported
that the Endowments Ministry has incurred over a billion Egyptian
pounds worth of debt to insurance companies, which may have led
officials in Alexandria to make such a large number of redundancies.

Mohamed
Hassan, a former worker at the ministry’s department in Alexandria,
explained that he and nearly 400 other workers were fired in November
2014. As a mosque custodian working full-time on a part-time contract,
Hassan said his total monthly wage amounted to just LE750.

“We
were laid-off nearly a year ago, and haven’t been paid since then, as we
didn’t agree to sign documents to forfeit our overdue bonuses, which we
hadn’t been paid for over five years. We were punitively sacked, as we
refused to be stripped of our rights.”

According to Hassan,
officials explained that they couldn’t make the payments due to the
large amount of debt the ministry owed.

“Our insurance payments
were being deducted from our wages each month. Yet when we asked about
our insurance policies, the ministry claimed we had none. So where has
all this money been going?”
Hassan added: “Ministerial officials
have repeatedly ignored us. It is on this basis that we sought an
audience with the presidential spokesperson at Abdeen, but to no avail.”

Several
workers filed a collective lawsuit against the ministry and its
employment policies, claiming they violate Egypt’s basic labor
provisions. The Administrative Court is scheduled to examine these
claims on November 1.

Shehata added that the state-controlled
Egyptian Trade Union Federation has not supported workers in their quest
for fair employment rights.